Comment by PaulHoule
2 days ago
Most of the time I have three side projects that I'm committed to and I really make progress on two and the other is aspirational -- which is fine.
Right now my current "project" is building a stock of photos so that I can post a continuous stream of photos on social
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/photography
This is pretty consuming because my developing process is intensive. I took about 3500 photos of two basketball games on Jan 31 and picked out about 400 to develop in DxO, I chose one color grade for all of them because a lot of the girls had bad acne that I wanted to minimize, now I am cropping them and applying local microcontrast to the parts in focus (but not faces of athletes with acne) I expect this take a few evenings, then there are many more batches of photos to develop including other games as well as tranches of flowers and landscapes. I have probably 15k undeveloped photos where those came from.
Another stream of that work is building an autoposter which will make it easier to keep these coming, for a while I was posting to Mastodon + Bluesky but lately I am posting to Facebook and LinkedIn, want to add Instagram (hate the UI for uploading) and Threads and anything else I can. That's blocked by my work to finish my Python API for using Postgres as an arangodb-like document database which blocks a whole bunch of projects that both involve moving forward, like a general purpose trainer for text classification and getting YOShInOn (my RSS reader) off arangodb. Feels overwhelming at time but the train is moving.
To summarize, sequential building didn't work, and parallel building you're currently in the evaluation phase of?
Parallel but with a limited number of streams (3) that I’m committed to. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
My RSS reader is ‘active” in the sense that I use it every day but I haven’t touched the code in months. I’ve been using Kanban control for side projects since maybe 3-4 years ago when I started doing side projects again. At the beginning of the year I had a lot of projects that were more programming heavy like I wrote a Python chess program that could beat my son that didn’t have time control, I did some work towards a Java chess program which would have had time control so we could take it to the chess club but my son quit going to chess club so I mothballed it.
The photo thing is converging towards transitioning from semi-pro to pro, figuring building my rep as a ‘social media photographer’ will get me work. I have other imaging projects in mind such as something to view stereograms with WebXR and something that can compose individual flowers to make ‘infinite flower fields’ that could be printed on fabrics but these are at the ‘pile of notes” phase waiting their turns.